Note:
This essay features excerpts from Daniel Kremer’s forthcoming book Joan
Micklin Silver: From Hester Street to Hollywood.

It
is difficult to imagine the role of Charles in the hands of the role’s other
early contenders, as John Heard is so quintessentially forlorn as our heroic schlemeil. United Artists initially suggested Robin Williams, Treat Williams, John Ritter, Richard Dreyfuss and Gary Busey. However, Silver and her intrepid producers insisted on signing Heard, who had starred in Silver's previous feature, the 1977 ensemble comedy Between the Lines. In
following the lives and loves of the reporters and editors at an underground
Boston newspaper, Between the Lines drew up a blueprint for the themes
further probed in Chilly Scenes ofWinter. Heard’s characters
in both films are restless and quixotic. That Silver twice cast Heard as
this key figure speaks to his qualities as a performer, and to something that
specifically Silver sees in him. As Silver directs him in these roles,
they resonate with depth and longing, especially in the case of Chilly Scenes of Winter.

Silver
explains, “John works as sort of a tragic hero in those two comedies that I
made with him because, unlike other actors who just figure out their own
character and say a line the way they say it, he really listens to everyone
during the scene, very intently, and he’s very attentive to signals he gets
from others, but there’s also this certain sad and lovable, lost quality in his
eyes. It’s easy to connect with the whole package he’s got as an
actor. It’s a Gary Cooper quality, and Cooper played a lot of tragic
heroes too.”

If
his character Harry Lucas in Between the Lines was the experimental
prototype for Silver’s Ultimate Sentimental Man, then Heard’s character Charles
in Chilly Scenes of Winter is
the full-scale model. He is defiant in his refusal to recognize his grand
romance with dream-girl Laura as a relic of the past, and actually lashes out
in anger, rage, and desperation when that is made too clear for comfort.

So
how does Charles end up? Do we as humans ever truly “get over” anything? In
the original release of the film, under the dubious title Head Over Heels
(imposed on the film by the studio), he winds up with Laura. For the 1982
rerelease, under the permanent title Chilly
Scenes of Winter,Silver hacked off the last scene and Charles winds up
alone. Silver explains, “You didn’t want [Laura] to come back. What really
gave you pleasure was to feel that he was free of his obsession. And by lopping
off that last scene, everything made more sense.”

This
new and final ending reveals the film’s true identity, as a comedy about
loss. In the center of the narrative is a key exchange of dialogue between
Charles, his roommate Sam, and his sister Susan. When Susan confronts
Charles about buying new clothes for his upcoming meeting with Laura, Sam
scoffs at the suggestion, roasting her with, “What do you want from a child her
age? She never even went to Woodstock!” Charles, at first puzzled,
replies, “Neither did we.” Sam pauses before clarifying his meaning in a
way that suggests the obviousness of what he intimates: “We could have.” Charles
ponders before conceding, “That’s true.” In the sixties, a romantic notion
meant the orchestration of a successful revolution and, through this, freeing
every other part of the self. In the de-radicalized seventies, lonely
Charles’s new romantic notion is to change his own world by rescuing lovely
Laura from a neglectful husband.

Film
scholar Danny Peary is keen in his observation that the film is about loss:
“Charles has lost Laura; Charles and sister Susan have lost their natural
father and are losing their mother to insanity; their mother, who lost her
first husband, is losing her mind; stepfather Pete is losing his wife; Laura
has lost her husband and stepdaughter; Rebecca has lost her stepmother; Sam has
lost his job, his apartment, and his knack for attracting women; Mr.
Patterson’s son has lost his chance to go to Harvard; the young characters have
lost the sixties.”

After
any loss is the struggle of surviving the loss. Therein lies the comfort
of sentimental pessimism, when all else fails. The apt term is weltschmerz
(literally “world misery,” but meaning “depression or apathy caused by
comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state”). Put
that in a cocktail with offbeat humor and you have something approaching Chilly Scenes of Winter.

#####

Daniel Kremer lives in San
Francisco, California. He has written for Filmmaker Magazine and Keyframe,
and is the author of the book Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films (available
through Patrick McGilligan’s Screen
Classics Series). He is currently writing a book about the life and
films of Joan Micklin Silver, due in 2018. Starring John Heard,
Mary Beth Hurt, Peter Riegert, Kenneth McMillan and Gloria Grahame, Chilly Scenes of Winter, featuring
an Audio Commentary with writer/director Silver and producer Ann Robinson, plus
an Isolated Track of Ken Lauber’s score that includes some unused music
positioned as originally intended, debuts on Twilight Time hi-def Blu-ray February
14. Preorders open February 1.

In director Joan Micklin Silver’s Between
the Lines (1977), actor John Heard, still going strong and celebrating his
71st birthday today, played an award-winning investigative reporter for an
alternative weekly (in the era when there were a ton of them) who has become
worn at the edges, dismayed by what he perceives as the dying embers of social
activism at [...]